India, July 4 -- Few Mughal rulers have been subjected to as many competing historical portraits as Aurangzeb. For more than a century, historians have quarrelled over his place in Indian history, investing his reign with meanings that often reveal as much about their own intellectual and political worlds as about the emperor himself. Munis D Faruqui's Aurangzeb 'Alamgir and the Mughal Empire: A History Retold belongs to this long historiographical conversation, though it seeks to move it in a different direction.

The book is best understood against the backdrop of Jadunath Sarkar's immensely influential though deeply critical portrait of Aurangzeb in the five-volume History of Aurangzib (1912-24). Sarkar treated the emperor's religious ...